It’s just weeks away from the 40th anniversary of the release of The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, arguably the defining single of the punk-rock revolution, and to the surprise of almost everyone, punk is still a thing in 2017, here and most everywhere else.

I get it. Yeah, tunes inspired by the Pistols, Rancid and the Stooges are not playing on hit radio — vacuous pop is. And, of course, there are millions more teens listening to Migos and Future than Rotten and Iggy.

But the punk fans are out there and you don’t have to look far to find them. Organizers of Rockfest in Montebello, which is happening again this year from June 22-25, estimate that about 200,000 young punks and metalheads turn up at the event every year. This year’s lineup includes Iggy Pop, The Offspring, Bad Religion, Pennywise, Good Charlotte and Sham 69.

On Thursday, promoters Evenko and Greenland announced that they are launching a new music festival, ’77 Montréal, celebrating 40 years of punk-rock music. It will be held on Parc Jean-Drapeau Friday, July 28, and tickets go on sale this Friday at noon. The idea is that it will be an annual event, taking place on the Friday, with Heavy Montreal, Evenko’s hard-rock fest running on the Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend. Heavy is on hiatus this summer.

The ’77 Montréal headliners are Rancid and the Dropkick Murphys, and the one-day punk fest also features X (on their 40th anniversary tour), The Vandals, The Bouncing Souls, Madball, Stiff Little Fingers lead singer Jake Burns, The Kingpins, Joyce Manor, The Creepshow and Barrasso.

“It’s a celebration of punk rock from the ’70s to today,” said Nick Farkas, vice-president of concerts and events at Evenko. “It’s all genres. You look at the lineup this year – it goes from hardcore to Rancid to X. It’s really trying to be representative of what the music started as and splintered into. We also really want it to be a family thing. So kids under 10 get in free. A lot of people into punk have kids.”

“For us, this is how we got into the business,” said Farkas, the “we” referring to him and his old friends Paget Williams and Dan Webster from Greenland.

The idea is also to make it a living archive of punk with exhibits of vintage posters, fanzines and archival promotional items. Then there’s the seventh edition of Pouzza Fest that is set to welcome 150 bands in venues around the city May 19-21, with Lagwagon, Pup and The Flatliners headlining.

Even cooler, there is a totally happening scene here in town with punk shows almost every night of the week, and often enough the average age on stage and in the mosh pit is between 18 and 22. Check out the Facebook page Montreal Punk Shows and you’ll see there’s almost always somewhere to go to have your ears blasted to smithereens with some noisy metallic music.

Who would’ve thunk it? There’s an audience of old-school fans to see first-wave bands like The Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers and The Damned — the first two played here a few months back and The Damned, hot on the heels of the 40th-anniversary re-issue of their classic Damned Damned Damned album, play Club Soda May 23.

Then there’s a much bigger audience for the bands that took punk sounds into the mainstream in the ’90s — outfits like Rancid, Bad Religion, The Offspring and Green Day (the latter who recently packed the Bell Centre). Then there are the college-age musicians and fans who weren’t even born when Green Day’s Dookie introduced the Ramones-meets-Clash formula to the kids in the suburbs of America.

And they’re playing in Montreal bands like The Barrelheads, Depwine, Offset, and Gazm — and kicking out the jams for a new generation on stages in small venues around the city.

It’s cool. I can still remember first hearing about the Pistols, Ramones and The Clash as a kid in high school and thinking that this was just the thing to serve as an antidote to all the prog-rock my stoner friends were force-feeding me at the time.

But did I think we’d still be listening to punk four decades later? No way. How many people who bought the God Save the Queen single in the spring of 1977 figured that kind of ferociously angry rock would still be striking a chord with people in 2017? Not many.

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